RADIATION TOLERANT LEON3 cPCI PROCESSOR BOARD

A prototypical radiation tolerant Compact PCI (cPCI) processor board has been developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory. The processor board is a low cost proof of concept using commercial and engineering grade parts. The design uses a radiation tolerant LEON3 processor and memories that are protected from radiation induced upset by error detection and correction (EDAC) hardware. The prototype has been successfully tested for PCI compliance with existing boards from Motorola, Vanguard, Gaisler, and custom boards designed at Los Alamos. The processor has 130 Mbytes of RAM and 16 Mbytes of non-volatile flash memory. There are Ethernet, USB, serial, JTAG, and PCI interfaces on the board, as well as a standard FPGA Mezzanine Card (FMC) site that can accept commonly available add on cards from industry such as analog-to-digital converters. A reconfigurable field programmable gate array (FPGA) is memory mapped into the LEON3 address space to provide flexible hardware co-processing capability and is also connected directly to the FMC site to allow for other custom interfaces and expansions. Since this is a functional prototype, not all of the components on the board are hardened. However, the existing commercial grade design, with some part substitutions, mitigation, and testing, is potentially radiation tolerant enough to be attractive to the safeguards community due to its low cost and cPCI compliance. This paper will explore the path forward for safeguards applications.